The faster wage growth in Germany, while it would augur well to bring down the gap in unit labor cost between the North and South, would impair Germany's competitiveness. The positive fallout would be the growth in the domestic sector and if investment and consumption could be balanced, this could attract movement of goods into Germany from the South as well, provided South could do the opposite. This prescription has one flaw that Germany cannot be the under-writer for drawing all the investment checks for mutual gains, while the losses would not be borne by any of the Southern States, or so it seems.

I would disagree with the writer about the primary aspect of the crisis.
The sovereign debt, banking crisis is just a symptom, like when one becomes feverish with a systematic disease.
We can treat the fever but if we do not cure the main disease the fever will come back and the patient continues to get sicker and sicker.
This is exactly what we see, all the stimulus, adjustment, so called solution is concentrated on the financial, banking sector, and after each micro recovery we find ourselves in deeper crisis than before.
The real problem is the unsustainable nature of our constant growth, expansive socio-economic system, and that in a global, integral, totally interdependent network we still try individual, national, self calculating solutions instead of full integration and truly mutual planning and decision making.
Unless we "stop for a minute" instead of running around like headless chickens, and start understanding our global system, with all of its conditions, and how natural, unbreakable laws dictate to us how to live in this network, we will exhaust all of our resources and will have no further opportunity to even hope for a better future.
Despite already having all the necessary objective, factual, scientific information around us we still refuse to look, and in the meantime we are running out of time.

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